Carlsson, a Swedish documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist, was found with his throat slit in the town of Kiunga, near the border with the disputed Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua. He had traveled to the region to make a film about the guerrilla organization Free Papua Movement, which is fighting for Irian Jaya’s independence from Indonesian rule.
“While the official version proclaimed that he had cut his throat with his own knife,” wrote reporter Oswald Iten in the well-regarded Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung nearly two years after the incident, “it was widely believed to be a case of Indonesian-financed assassination.”